Ladner v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1958
Citation profile
736 federal appellate · 33 district · 353 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,405 later decisions (58 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 2024 · most notably Teague v. Lane (1989), United States v. Bass (1971)
736 federal appellate · 33 district · 353 state decisions — followed in 33 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Appellate journey
reviewedLadner v. United States (from Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Bell v. United States · United States v. Hayman · Gore v. United States · Prince v. United States · Walker v. Johnston
Cited together with Bell v. United States · United States v. Universal C. I. T. Credit Corp. · Blockburger v. United States · Bifulco v. United States · United States v. Bass
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 1,405 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This policy of lenity means that the Court will not interpret a federal criminal statute so as to increase the penalty that it places on an individual when such an interpretation can be based on no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.”
61 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[A]n interpretation that there are as many assaults committed as there are officers affected would produce incongruous results. Punishments totally disproportionate to the act of assault could be imposed because it will often be the case that the number of officers affected will have little bearing upon the seriousness of the criminal act. For an assault is ordinarily held to be committed merely by putting another in apprehension of harm whether or not the actor actually intends to inflict or is capable of inflicting that harm. Thus under the meaning for which the Government contends, one who shoots and seriously wounds an officer would commit one offense punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment, but if he points a gun at five officers, putting all of them in apprehension of harm, he would commit five offenses punishable by 50 years’ imprisonment, even though he does not fire the gun and no officer actually suffers injury. It is difficult, without a clear[er] indication than the materials before us provide, to find that Congress intended this result. [ 358 U.S. at 177 , 79 S.Ct. at 213-214 ; footnote omitted.]”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“we cannot find that Congress intended that a single act of assault [i.e., the single discharge of a shotgun] affecting two officers constitutes two offenses under the statute.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.